Stuff

ComRes’s monthly telephone poll for the Daily Mail is out today and has topline figures of CON 42%, LAB 28%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 9%, GRN 6%. The last time the Conservatives reached the heights of 42% in any poll was way back in 2010. Full tables for the poll are here.

The poll also had a bank of questions on perceptions of the four Labour leadership contenders and whether people would vote for them. In my last post I wrote about how such questions really don’t tell us very much: none of the candidates are well known to the public, and how people would vote with x or y as leader is an extremely hypothetical question – what policies will they follow? How will the media and public react? Will the party be united, split or riven with dissent? I don’t know and neither do the poll respondents.

For what it’s worth though, the main finding here was how little there was to choose between the candidates. ComRes asked if people would vote for Labour with the four candidates, the spread was between Burnham and Corbyn on 22% down to Kendall on 18%. They asked who had what it took to be PM, Burnham, Cooper and Corbyn were essentially in a three way tie on 23%-24%. Given the standard margin of error on a poll this size, it suggests the wider public really aren’t that enthused by any of them.

Corbyn may surprise us yet. He obviously won’t gather many votes from Tories, but he might gain some from non-voters who were 34% of the electorate last time, and Greens and fringe socialist parties.

If the parliamentary Labour party holds together and he can find enough people prepared to serve in the Shadow cabinet, he could conceivably gain say 5% non-voters and 3% from other sources. It’s a question of whether these would offset voters who leave Labour because of him.

I’m no dyed in the wool Corbynite, but I’m loving the broadening of policy debate and I think we are sitting in a huge arc between triumph and disaster, depending on a number of variables, but I would be astonished if Labour’s low went below the mid to late 20s.

GUEST
“Can anyone explain the contradiction between the headline Labour voting intention (28%) and the much lower figures forfor Labour voting intention for ANY of the potential leaders?”

I think it must be something to do with the folk memory of the unions,working rights, the cooperative movement, the NHS, the ending of apartheid, reform of the justice and prisons systems, and votes for women being at the foundation of the Labour Party.

Labour managed 28% in 1983. Politics is much, much less tribal now their ‘core’ vote must be very much less that this now. All actions since the election by Labour would indicated that they are determined to prove to us what their core, tribal vote is next time round. Maybe the new leader will pull them together, maybe.

““be happy”, how can I not be? I cannot conceive of the Labour movement being in a bigger pile of manure, how ever hard I try.”

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Well, that’s ok Roly, ‘cos plenty others to fill that gap for ya!! There is seemingly no limit to the dire prognostications. Just with Corbs alone, peeps are on the case, thinking up new criticisms, monitoring the media to find some new angle, so you don’t have to!!

Some of them may even turn out to be true. Though as we saw with Mili, the reasons he lost were not the reasons his critics thought. It wasn’t so much swing back from Labour to Tories, owing to economy etc., but peeps shifting to UKIP over immigration, SNP over devolution, and Greens over the lab-not-left-enough thing.

Which is even more reason for you to be cheerful, since chances therefore are that there may be even more ways to diss Corbs that peeps aren’t seeing and it’ll prolly be one of those things which does for him.

On the other hand, there maybe summat that turns out in Corbs’ favour that most don’t see, which up-ends things, à la rise of SNP. Just in case you were thinking of doing a Paddy and thinking about betting your hat etc…

CL has an open letter to JC in the Indie. But the Greens are second only in constituencies where Labour is the first. If they can overcome this minor issue, I will start to believe that miracles exist indeed.

The Blairites wanted a party without direct Trades Union involvement (only 45 quid individual members) and that did not invite the whole world and their social media mates to hop on the latest bandwagon for 3 quid a pop

That is 100% untrue. The “supporters” scheme was conceived by the good people at Progress and welcomed by such luminaries as Tony Blair himself. To be fair to them, they wanted the threshold a little higher than £3 because God forbid any povvos get involved in a Labour leadership election, but the general concept was theirs.

John Rentoul hailed the reforms as “complicated but sensible” and “one of the best and bravest things that Miliband has done”.

@ Liz H,

IIRC Jack Straw is still suspended for getting caught up in that Cash for Questions sting.

David Cameron will be overwhelmed by the amount of ammo at his disposal when he faces JC at P-M-Q’s.

While this is true, I’m not sure citing Tony Blair and Gordon Brown is all that helpful for Cameron. They’re not exactly popular figures with the general public, and it just bolsters Corbyn’s anti-establishment credentials. It does make him look extreme, but the whole Corbyn strategy is based on denouncing New Labour and the Government’s whole strategy is also based on denouncing New Labour, so to some extent they have common cause.

Also, Cameron’s goal at PMQs is to paint Labour as high spending, soft on benefit recipients and in favour of immigration. As far as Corbyn’s concerned, these are key campaign pledges. I think he’ll be in deep trouble because the public hate all those things and it’s hard to shift the Overton Window from opposition, but Corbyn will be failing on his own terms, not because Blair said some nasty things about him.

He’s changing my blood pressure but not my VI, and I reckon a lot of the soft left are in the same place. Unlike the hard left, Labour moderates really don’t have anywhere else to go.

So I’d say… 20%-45% in opposition, 20-30% at the general election. I think there’s a decent chance that he could consolidate the protest vote and open up a commanding poll lead for most of this Parliament. The problem is he’s completely unelectable as PM, so in a way this is actually the worst case scenario for Labour: he does well enough as Opposition Leader they can’t get rid of him but he’s a time bomb for 2020.

ComRes asked if people would vote for Labour with the four candidates, the spread was between Burnham and Corbyn on 22% down to Kendall on 18%.

It’s worth pointing out that we need to be careful with what we compare these figures to. These were based on the whole of the ComRes sample (1001) (p 14), but only 207 people out of that said they would vote Labour (after weighting but before the ComRes ‘squeeze questions) and reallocating DKs, Refuseds etc[1]. So the comparable raw figure for Labour is 21% not the 28% VI headline.

As it happens ComRes also show the figures after the same adjustments that they make to VI

The temptation for respondents is to use these sort of questions to ‘send a message’, so I’m surprised they all weren’t rather lower. Normally those not wanting candidate X will say they wouldn’t vote for the Party, even though they still will, to indicate that they would prefer candidate Y. This means that the response for all candidates will be lower than it really is. I wonder if this is more of a problem with online polls

It suggests it really doesn’t make any difference to Labour’s polling whoever gets chosen. Providing it isn’t Kendall, and even that may be due to the lower recognition factors we have seen in other polls. So if the public isn’t enthused, they’re not really repelled either. It’s too soon to tell and plans for celebrating inevitable Labour’s apotheosis or Armageddon should be put on hold.

I have watched and listened JC. He really has a skill of being PTFE coated. It is fascinating how he can just simply ignore things he doesn’t want to talk about, and it works.

You maybe right about the public opinion about the issues, but DC wouldn’t just be able to shout at him (as he has done with EM). It would come across like the rowdies at the back of the bus – little sympathy for them by the public.

Well there’s the thing. How do the public really perceive this stuff. I mean, maybe when it comes to Stalin, peeps mightn’t care for the gulags and stuff, but maybe more people like five year plans than one might think.

Or maybe they hate the tractor production plans more than the gulags, anything is possible these days.

He is not a Trotskyite either. If he was he would have established his (another) successor party of the Fourth International.

I think he is pretty much centrist, but what the content is, well, that is repackaged in the language of the left. It is a pretty decent content by the way, and if John Pilgrim is right and the institutional background can be created, and those activists keep up even when they are back to work or the uni, well, anything can happen. It will have to be repackaged again though (in my opinion).

I have a collection of book by various British politicians, MPs, judges, etc. writing about the Soviet Union (and Stalin,and the trials, the plans) in the 1930s (it’s fascinating how easily they published their books, and there had to be many copies if these survived) – from about forty different people.

On this basis, I can fully endorse your comment. People just picked what they liked or disliked, created a narrative and labelled the message, it would be the same today.

Yes, but being a vegetarian, he won’t be caught on the bacon sandwich, and as long as JH is the government, homeopathy won’t hurt him either (the Tory press publishes more woo anyway). He directed the dress code criticism already in the 1980s. And the Islamist won’t stick either considering the (inadvertent) pro-ISIS actions of his critiques.

I think Straw was suspended from the PLP but not from the Party itself. As he was retiring his PLP membership was lapsing anyway. Presumably he was appointed to this committee before the ‘cash for access’ revelations and no one in the Establishment would think that would disqualify anyone from opining on freedom of information. Quite the opposite probably.

It has got me thinking about Corbyn’s threat not to join the Privy Council. It might be quite clever. True you don’t get all those ‘security briefings’, but since such things rely on you believing the competence and honesty of the security services, he may feel he isn’t missing much. It may also restrict you because is you’re told some great revelation sub rosa you can’t make a fuss about it, even if you’d already read it on the internet and been told about it by three separate reliable sources.

And of course it gives Corbyn another anti-Establishment credential, without actually having to do anything. So unless you ache to be called ‘Right Honourable'[1], it’s probably not worth the hassle. And it will annoy all the right people.

[1] Some people do. Alan Clark’s ecstasy in his Diaries at finally being inducted is really quite sad.

I agree, his domestic policy ideas are mostly fine, but they have a fringe left wrapper that people will find unappealing. I suspect you need to find some nice working class bloke with a white van (“Respect!”) to advocate for them if you want mass support.

@ Roger Mexico,

Yeah, I don’t think it will hurt him with the public at all. It just irritates politics nerds.

But the thing about all his irritating qualities (Tolerance for anti-semitism! Believing in homeopathy! New Labour-style deflecting questions by asking and then answering an easier rhetorical question! Having a stupid beard! This Privy Council showboating!) is I’m prepared to put up with any of them in a leader who can win elections. So in the end it all comes down to the fundamental question of whether he’s a herald of the revolution or the vanguard of a nonexistent movement.

Corbyn’s fate rests partly on his ability to form a decent shadow cabinet.

If he is genuinely committed to party unity (and personally I see no reason to believe otherwise) and chooses accordingly he’ll be able to put together a sane, left wing, and modern policy platform and rebuild the party’s grassroots organisation at the same time.

If he gives anything remotely important to Michael Meacher we’re all in trouble.

I’m looking at a picture of the 4 protagonists, in appearance, JC is morphing into Tony Benn, when, on the advice of his stylist, he shaves off the daft facial hair, he will emerge as TB, not half as clever though. :-)

It mainly comes from the U.S., and then popularised by op.ed pieces and of course social media (which is another op.ed) around the world.

I would say that the Overton window is not about framing the question, but creating a package on the basis of begging the question, and presenting it to the public. I don’t want to take it too far, but in the last 10 years Labour has been unable to frame any question really, and eventually the package got empty (except for some sparks in the last five years, but they were just that).

The interesting thing is that the Overton window is pretty centre right (or even right), while the MSM is centre left (I think it actually emerged because of the mobile devices).

I don’t know who is going to win the Labour leadership or election, or the 2020 general election come to that. Anything can happen.

I’ve just been looking at the Labour target seats page on the election guide part of this site.

It shows that Labour have to win 94 seats to gain a majority in 2020. Of these 94 seats 80 are Conservative held at present. Eight are SNP and these are mostly those with a less close result this time. The remainder are three LD seats and the Green seat.

Any seats lost by Labour, for example in marginal seats in the English Midlands, will mean that more than 94 have to be gained elsewhere. I think this is what Pete B was alluding to.

It looks like a tough call for any of the Labour leadership candidates.

Whether to play safe in this situation, or perhaps Labour may decide there is little to lose, is for others to decide. But it is at least worth looking at the figures.

As to the private conversations on UKPR – I suppose any social group would develop its own vocabulary, and as there is no authority over this, so identical contents are expressed in different words, terms, and become codes essentially by popular votes. Importantly, even if the site is about the objective analysis of polling evidence, ideological stances actually create dialects in this common vocabulary (Amber Star when she was active here, was really great in this).

Additionally, while there is fragmentation in the left, the right and the centre stances here, as usual, the right is more cohesive (except for certain periods, when the left can actually combine the big picture and the details).

Furthermore, there are individuals, who bring their own vocabulary, jokes, arguments, etc. it takes time to figure it out, and translate them to your own language. Moreover, many contributors are transient here, even if they have been around for years, which makes it even more difficult.

But for some reason it works here … To a degree, it’s like being in a new workplace for a while.

Interestingly, Without losing the precision of his points, his comments have changed somewhat in the last fortnight and you can see another very pleasing aspect of the way of his thinking process: the skeptical mind (I hope it’s ok, Roger Mexico).